Collaborations

State and Federal

The center is dedicated to bringing diverse healthcare stakeholders together to create impactful real world research, generate evidence, disseminate best practices, and advance education. These collaborative efforts will be directed towards raising awareness and helping implement rigorous evaluations, solutions, best practices, and policies toward improving patient health outcomes and health care delivery. One of the key objectives of policy shaping will be to help define, build, and champion new value-based payment models that account for value-added services aimed at optimizing medications. We envision highly collaborative research that will result in endorsement of new and innovative approaches of care delivery at the state (Medicaid) and federal (Medicare) levels and encourage adoption by payers and providers across the state and the nation. The true impact of this collaboration on human health and health care delivery will be realized by carrying out our mission toward a shared vision to define and deliver “value” in pharmacy practice and patient-centered care delivery for system-wide benefit. The center’s current collaborations are highlighted below.

North Carolina

Enhancing the Role of the Pharmacist in North Carolina

The center is involved in a formal collaboration with Community Care of North Carolina in an effort to innovate and create best practices around medication optimization and the role of the pharmacist as an integral member of the health care team in the delivery of high quality, patient-centered care. The collaborative partnership utilizes existing Community Pharmacy Enhanced Services Networks, which were created by CCNC in 2014, to broaden capacity for care management and medication optimization services. The CPESN encourages relationships between pharmacists, nurse-care managers, and physicians in order to help provide patients with the best care possible.

The pharmacists’ role is to review medication reconciliations completed by care managers and perform comprehensive reviews to communicate medication issues to the patients’ primary care provider with the goals of improving the quality of care, reducing preventable hospital readmissions and emergency department visits. Within each network, patients are part of a “Pharmacy Home.” This gives pharmacists and care managers access to pharmacy claims data, progress notes, lab data, medical history, and other patient information to help recognize potential drug interactions, declining health from adherence issues, and polypharmacy or drug cost issues.